He was born and raised in New York, but Peter Magowan now stands on the precipice of a legacy as the man who saved baseball in San Francisco.

He saved it by heading up the brick and steel ballpark on Third Street, by building something out of nothing, by giving the Giants a home by the Bay, by forever rendering meaningless the idea of the Tampa/St. Petersburg Giants, or the Northern Virginia Giants or the Anywhere but The City Giants.

He gathered his boys, put together ideas, won an election where you just can't win an election, sold the park's name to a phone company, didn't use any public money and peddled 29,000 season tickets - all because he couldn't bear the idea of the alternative.

If necessity is the mother of the invention, consider Magowan the neediest guy around.

"The alternative was that the Giants would leave, and the alternative was just not acceptable," Magowan said with the opening of his life's dream, Pacific Bell Park, drawing near.

But Magowan, the team president and managing general partner, is the public face atop the stadium, as out in the open as the Willie Mays statue planned for the main gate, as looming as the Coke bottle in left field. He's on the hook if this thing is a bust in five years, if it turns into a ghost town of debt; conversely, he stands to be a hero for the decades if, as he predicts, Pacific Bell Park stands majestically in its spot for a half-century, a beacon for the timeless game of baseball and a mecca for generations of Giants fans.

Magowan doesn't think the Giants have just built a stadium but have saved the soul of The City. He saw the Giants and Dodgers leave New York in 1958. He never wanted to see it again if he had something to say about it.

"I don't think Brooklyn has recovered to this day," Magowan said. "People were that upset and disillusioned. We just couldn't let that happen in San Francisco. We believed enough that it must not happen, to find a way.

"We knew that if we failed, it was all over. It was really all over. We would have put the team up for sale and, in my opinion, nobody in the Bay Area would have bought it. We couldn't have seen them bought by out-of-towners, which would have happened."

Talk about saving a team, a city, a game. Magowan and Co. didn't just keep the Giants here, they gave them what has to be one of the most splendiferous cribs around. Magowan and Co. didn't just build a stadium, they commissioned a park to honor the game and its past, a monument to baseball that is so anti-Candlestick as to be hilarious.

If the Giants were going to stay in town, Magowan said, they would do so in style. Yes, Camden Yards in Baltimore, Coors Field in Denver, Jacobs Field in Cleveland and The Ballpark in Arlington are all retro-cool parks, and yes, the Giants wanted to replicate many of their features. But just as important, the Giants wanted to incorporate elements from more historical diamonds, from Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago. And, yes, from Seals Stadium down at 16th and Bryant.

"Knowing we had an urban park, we wanted an old-fashioned look of brick and steel," Magowan said. "We did not want concrete. We did not want a park like Candlestick or in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia where you could be in any park and not know what city you're in.

"You see Fenway Park, you know you're in Boston. You watch TV and you don't need to see 'Cubs' on the uniform to tell where you are. You can tell by the ivy, the bricks, the people in the stands. We wanted people to know our park was in San Francisco, and that it was unique and different."

Therefore, you will see all kinds of funky design features at this park, most of them well-documented. The 307-foot short porch in right field. The never-ending gap of 420 feet in right-center field. The Bay behind the right-field wall.

"Major League Baseball wanted 330 feet down the line, 375 to the power alleys, 400 feet to center and 8-foot high walls," Magowan said. "We wanted high walls and low walls. We wanted angles, and short and deep distances. We wanted asymmetrical things, and we wanted seats as close as possible to the field.

"We wanted all the seats to face the pitcher, like at Wrigley and at Seals Stadium. We wanted bullpens on the field, like in Wrigley. Wrigley Field was built in 1912, but it had it all: green seats, seats that faced the pitcher, quirky features."

Like many in the Bay Area, Magowan is a transplant. But like many, he has come to embrace his home for the past 43 years and considers himself a part of The City's landscape. That's why building the ballyard became such a mandate in Magowan's mind. He pointed to the new Main Library, the Museum of Modern Art, the refurbished Opera House as all gleaming examples of San Francisco's move into the 21st century.

Add Pacific Bell Park to the list, he says, pointing to the boom of restaurants, bars and trendy housing going up in the suddenly hot area of China Basin.

All of which brings up an issue: Has Magowan made Giants baseball into a nouveau trend, building a corporate park that will demolish the memory of the hard-core Giants fan from the 'Stick? After all, part of the appeal of being a Giants fan was that instant bonding you did with that stranger, that bearded Hell's Angel in the crowd on a frigid night at the 'Stick, brought together by shared love for the black and orange and common sympathy for battling the

elements.

Now, with so many tickets sold at such lofty prices, might Peter's Palace turn into Dodger Stadium North?

"A lot of people say our true fans have been priced out, but that's not true," Magowan said. "We know that a lot of the old fans have signed on. Yes, we will have some stockbroker types who will take in a few innings and leave, but I believe they'll be in the minority.

"This stadium will create new fans, and it's built for the fan, not for the corporate type."

And yet, Magowan without apology had to sell off much of the stadium to finance it. The Giants weren't getting public help, so things had to be sold. Starting with the name, for $50 million to Pacific Bell. Although the Giants never considered the romantic, local possibility of, say, Anchor Steam Field, they did flirt with a more audacious thought.

Its genesis came from retired broadcaster Hank Greenwald, who said to Magowan one day: "Hey, Peter, how about calling it the Polo Grounds?" Magowan thought of Ralph Lauren's fashion empire, and bells went off in his head. He called Lauren, who Magowan had met, and said to him: "Ralph, do you like baseball?" Answered Lauren: "I love baseball. I grew up watching the Giants at the Polo Grounds."

"Then do I have an idea for you," Magowan said, then pitched the notion of naming rights.

There was a pause and Lauren said: "I love it. It's great. So, what are we talking about, a million dollars or so?"

Magowan chuckled remembering the story. "Uh, I was thinking somewhere north of that," the Giants co-owner said.

But naming rights got settled. The money came from Pac Bell, more money came from the successful seat sales, and the rest was borrowed from a bank, some $150 million of debt. All worth it to build the ballyard, says Magowan, who has driven from his home in Pacific Heights on many occasions to sit in the park, all alone, and gaze at the dream.

He thinks about what he and his partners have done. He thinks about saving the Giants in the sweetest way imaginable.

"I don't care who gets the credit, but I do care that the Giants are safe," Magowan said. "They almost moved in 1976 and in 1992. I saw the Giants and Dodgers move out of New York. And the Giants had won it all in 1954, the Dodgers in '55 in the biggest, richest city in the world. I couldn't understand how that city lost two clubs.

"Now, that won't be a problem here. Fans of the Giants and National League baseball will have it in The City. This stadium should protect fans from fear. If there's a legacy left, it's that I left comfortable with the assumption that the Giants will stay here." &lt;